Italian Dolomites Part 1 - Passo di Giau & Croda da Lago
Full screen gallery below
Let me start with saying (btw all photos below), I love the mountains! Especially the Dolomites. I first visited the Dolomites in the 2000s for skiing or in my case snowboarding and I was amazed by the rolling hills and the raw mountain peaks. The colours especially, the grey and pink massive monolith rocks with razor-sharp edges and the patterns within the mountains. Since then, I have been there more than once. This spiked my interest to be there in late summer of autumn for hiking and photography. This is my blog, in parts, of that adventure!
The plan was to drive to the Dolomites and stay centrally and do day trips. We eventually ended up in the area of Passo di Giau, Passo Falzarego and Valparola. By we, I mean myself and my friend Marnix, see more here about his work. The plans were laid out and we were ready to go explore. The bags where packed with Fujifilm gear, survival and aid kits and something dry (much needed).
I arrived, after a long journey and traffic jams, around sunset. Wow! The mountains, the sky and the whole surrounding was just coloured orange, pink and purple. This was a truly spectacular sight. So I was very keen on getting epic sunset shots later on in the week. This turned out to be a challenge though.
Passo di Giau
The first thing, the next day, was to explore Passo di Giau as I wanted to go and see sunset at Croda da Lago just one mountain further near Cortina d’Ampezzo. So get up and go! Passo di Giau is situated at 2236m so pretty high up. You can start to feel the lack of oxygen in the air. Nonetheless you have a great view on the surrounding areas and the next valleys.
The day started out fairly well, but I did not get up that early as the long journey from the day before drained some extra energy. The day started of at 11h-ish when arriving on top of the pass. There I was confronted that the weather that day had different things in mind than nice sun rays and sunset later that day. This was a bummer, but not the last one, seeing the epic sunset the evening before really had my hopes up.
I started to explore the surroundings and took a short hike. Walked up to the mountains and saw the first climbers there. Really impressive to see them climb up the large massive rocks. I will do that sometime in the future as I’m seriously curious in doing some real climbing instead of hiking. However this trip was all about photography and hikes, so no climbing this time around.
Moving onwards you could see the back of Cinque Torri and the lift and pistes where I did my snowboarding a year earlier. It was pretty cool to this specific place in a different context. As I would again a few days later at Passo Valparola and Lagazuoi.
Croda da Lago
After a few hours seeing the surroundings of Passo di Giau I was ready to move on. The weather did not really cleared, so the hike to Croda da Lago was next on the list, with hopefully a sunset. Just a couple of kilometers down the road from Passo di Giau the trailhead appeared. The first part of the trail was quite ok, easy going through the forest. However slowly and slowly you start to climb to get over the mountain ridge to get to the lake at the other side.
This was a lot harder than I expected looking at Google Maps. However when walking the trail I downloaded the trail information via the all trails app and quickly saw that I needed to climb a lot in the first 2-3km of the hike. So that meant going up fast and steep. Still tired from the day before I was a real challenge. The surroundings were beautiful though and the higher up the forest seemed to change more and more. Even managed to cross a small river/canyon.
A bit further a the path started to even out and the climb was “over”. Crossing a small meadow filled with trees, I ended up at the lake. The lake, man it was beautiful. Calm, serene and a mirror like water surface. Perfect for photos. One thing though, the clouds started to rollover the mountains and that lasted right up to sunset. So no sunset at Croda da Lago. A real pity to say the least. Still the hike, the surroundings and just being out in nature just made my day. How I love to hike, the mountains and real nature as a whole. Let’s face it, we just do not have real nature in the Netherlands anymore.
I did manage to circle the lake and take different photos from different perspectives. I think I like the one with the Refugio in the photos the most. It just captures the mood at that moment and a real feel of being in the mountains on an epic hike.
All in all a good day, no sunset, but truly great hike and surroundings. All photos where shot with the Fujifilm X-T3 and the Fujinon lenses; 10-24F4, 16-55F2.8 and the 50-140F2.8 all really wonderful lenses. Plus the newly acquired Fujifilm X100F (I’m so nice, I bought it twice)
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